Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday June 24, 2013 @11:03AM
from the better-than-the-sun dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Harvard's Clean Energy Project (CEP) is using IBM's World Community Grid, a 'virtual supercomputer' that leverages volunteers' surplus computing power, to determine which organic carbon compounds are best suited for converting sunlight into electricity. IBM claims that the resulting database of compounds is the 'most extensive investigation of quantum chemicals ever performed.' In theory, all that information can be utilized to develop organic semiconductors and solar cells. Roughly a thousand of the molecular structures explored by the project are capable of converting 11 percent (or more) of captured sunlight into electricity—a significant boost from many organic cells currently in use, which convert between 4 and 5 percent of sunlight. That's significantly less than solar cells crafted from silicon, which can produce efficiencies of up to nearly 20 percent (at least in the case of black silicon solar cells). But silicon solar cells can be costly to produce, experiments with low-grade materials notwithstanding; organic cells could be a cheap and recyclable alternative, provided researchers can make them more efficient. The World Community Grid asks volunteers to download a small program (called an 'agent') onto their PC. Whenever the machine is idle, it requests data from whatever project is on the World Community Grid's server, which it crunches before sending back (and requesting another data packet). Several notable projects have embraced grid computing as a way to analyze massive datasets, including SETI@Home."

but it suddenly occurs to me... am I using my idle cycles to provide some pharmaceutical company with more patents? Once this distributed computing program reaches its goal... who will be making money? Should I worry about that/them?

but it suddenly occurs to me... am I using my idle cycles to provide some pharmaceutical company with more patents? Once this distributed computing program reaches its goal... who will be making money? Should I worry about that/them?

For this project you'd be using your idle cycles to provide some solar cell company with more patents (probably a Chinese company too, since American ones seem to dead or dying). That's the problem with making universities use patents to fund themselves - it defeats the entire idea of open research that universities are supposed to be about. The Bayh-Dole Act [wikipedia.org] seemed like a good idea at the time (I supported it), but in hindsight it was a mistake. Let's get rid of it. I know that many university researchers

Nice of them to mention that SETI has also "embraced" this. It's only the largest and one of the oldest public projects to utilize distributed computing, having lead the way in the development and popularization of the technology.

The interesting thing about SETI it is one of those projects where the side effect technology is more important then their main research goal.Scanning Space Radio signals trying to find Extraterrestrial life is in itself rather futile goal.

1. Radio Waves bounce off atmosphere. Sure it does get threw however most of our random singles from TV really get so bombarded by static that the waves data is nearly traceable due to the static from space. Even before we leave the solar system.

"Nice of them to mention that SETI has also "embraced" this. It's only the largest and one of the oldest public projects to utilize distributed computing, having lead the way in the development and popularization of the technology."

Also, SETI@home and Folding@home, etc., use the BOINC infrastructure, not IBM's. You can be fairly certain that BOINC projects will not be used for corporate profit unless it's a corporation that is sponsoring the project.

Not necessarily so, using IBM's infrastructure. When have they ever done anything that wasn't for corporate profit. Hell, they even shipped Hollerith-type machines to the Nazis during WWII to help keep track of the prisoners in the concentration camps.

Ahem, you know that IBM Wolrd Community Grid use the BOINC client too, right? And many of the projects there make available the results to every scientists that wants it. The CEP database itself is open to everyone to browse and consult.

"Ahem, you know that IBM Wolrd Community Grid use the BOINC client too, right? And many of the projects there make available the results to every scientists that wants it. The CEP database itself is open to everyone to browse and consult."

I did not know that, and I don't doubt it, but it matters little to me. If they use BOINC anyway, then what purpose do they serve?

My point was that for the most part I trust BOINC, but not IBM. I do not put it past IBM to lie, cheat, and steal as long as it makes them a profit.

Don't get me wrong: IBM has done some great things. And a lot of good research has come out of the Watson Research Center, for example. But it was also done for corporate profit, not for humanitarian reasons. Not that there is a

Because if you can build one at 3% and one at 9% but all other costs being the same, you build the 9% one. They're figuring out which is the most efficient so they know what order to look at capabilities/options on. Start with the most efficient, and work your way down the list until you find one that meets the other criteria.

Also this way there is a globally-accessible and searchable database of all the materials and their various properties - so for your exotic project with a weird requirement, you can find the materials most appropriate to your situation.

This is useful for more than coming up with a single solar cell, it helps pave the groundwork for hundreds of varieties - each the best-fit for a different situation.

Example: Organic compounds may make sense if you can 'grow' the system for a self-repairing/expanding system,

I don't understand why efficiency is so important - $/W seems a much more important measure, given that arid land area is cheap and sunlight is free.

I'd bet it's because the physical structure that holds the cells, along with site preparation, probably costs much more per square meter than the land itself. So a more efficient cell would directly lead to a reduction in $/W by minimizing this overhead.

Then you're calculating $/W wrong, because this cost should obviously be included. Of course $/W is meaningless if the $ part is only whatever fraction of the cost you feel like putting in a news article.

You seem confused. I"m calculating $/W correctly because I did include all the costs, not just land. I explained how efficiency affects that. I didn't put anything into a news article.

$/W comes down as more people use a particular technology. So with this new information you can look at the basics, which of the better materials do you have available, which ones are you best at scaling, etc. From those basics you can make good choices about which will be best for you in the future. And most of the organic cells have the potential to be much cheaper than silicon... at scale.

Rooftop area is a limited resource. Considering that many solar panels are installed on rooftops that limit is a factor.

Even if land area is cheap efficiency is still a major factor. If one designed a solar array that used an acre of cells that are 20% efficient one would have to use four time that if the efficiency was 5%. That would men four times the support structure to deal with the pannels. The land costs would be dwarfed by the costs of the installation of all those pannels.

Look at any suburb in the world and you will see that there are rooftops big enough to power houses using higher efficiency cells but not low efficiency cells.

Efficiency is part of the $/W calculation.

Another example of the importance of efficiency is use in mobile situations. Say you have a motorhome powered by solar panels. Say you need to set up and orient 1 2'x6' panel to power the rig of the panel was 20% efficient. Would you really want to do that with four 5% efficient panels? A cell phone charger th

LOL. Try actually computing how much land area is required to cover 1% of US electrical baseload given 20% solar panel efficiency and 600W - 1000W incident solar radiation per square meter on a perfectly sunny day in May (e.g. most optimal time of the year.)

FWIW, I once ran the numbers for the full load, assumed a magical 40% cell and it was still 1/4 of the entire land area of New Mexico, and that wasn't allowing for space between the panels for service or any failure rate.

Nobody is seriously suggesting 100% of ANY energy source unless they are a salesman or somebody that fell for the sales talk. The "can power all of whatever with this much" is just to make it easier for people to understand the large numbers, like all those examples with volkswagons, football fields or libraries of congress. There's too much variation to get more than rough numbers anyway so 1kW per square metre is as good as anything.

The driving factor for whether such things get used or not is how conv

LOL. Try actually computing how much land area is required to cover 1% of US electrical baseload given 20% solar panel efficiency and 600W - 1000W incident solar radiation per square meter on a perfectly sunny day in May (e.g. most optimal time of the year.)

You should quickly come to the realization that solar is a complete boondoggle, even at 100% panel efficiency.

Annualized average US power = 440GW. Your 1% of US power is 4.4GW. At 20% of 800W/m^2, that's 6800 acres, or about 10 square miles.

You seem to have a problem with that?

IIRC, about 1/6 of the 90,000,000 acres of corn grown in the US goes to silly schemes to make ethanol, which is 2000 times as much land as your example. That seems like a prime candidate to replace with far more efficient solar panels, especially if the areas with the most dire depletion of aquifers are reallocated first.

a 'virtual supercomputer' that leverages volunteers' surplus computing power

The first thing I thought when I read that was: "Fools. You're wasting your own energy to fund somebody else's patent portfolio (and wallet)." The idea that this might be a good idea or could forward some facet of science or could make the world a better place didn't even occur to me. I'm getting to be too cynical I think...

There are several problem with relying on volunteers. First one does not know for certain if the volunteer is going to return the finished work unit. So one must put a deadline on returning it. If one sends a work unit to one volunteer and they fail to return it before the deadline than one will have to send it to another and give another deadline. Since this pattern could repeat itself it is better to send the same work unit to more than one volunteer to ensure at least one is returned. In fact it is

So if we now know over a thousand compounds that convert at least 11% of the sunlight, then we should simply employ nine of the cheapest to achieve 99% conversion, solving the problem once and for all!

It's a condition of entry that all the results derived from grid computing work on World Community Grid, of which CEP is a sub project, must be made freely available to all researchers. That said, someone will have to go on and commercialize the work and so make a profit somewhere, but at least everyone gets an open go at it.

IBM do not own the results of this research, they're just sponsors of the central hardware and storage, and help with initial programming and set-up.

CEP is the only one of the World Community Grid projects that I don't crunch for as it has fairly onerous data transfer and computing requirements. It's a bit of a PITA.

Being a scientist working on design of organic photovoltaic materials, I can only say that this is hype. A much worse hype than medicinal QSAR for designing new drugs. It is very unlikely that this project will lead to anything useful (the papers they published so far did not bring anything new or interesting).